"Retro Tea Breaks Vol. 1"

Posted: 21 March, 2021

Neil Thomas' Selected Interviews Vol.1 crept up on me. I'd seen bits and bobs of his work on You Tube, so had a passing familiarity with who he was, but I had no idea a book was in the works until right at the end of the Kickstarter. I'm glad I caught it!

I'm not a fan of the whole "Retro Industry". There's an odd, I guess tolerable, side to it, that laser-targets people desperate to recreate their childhood bedrooms, bobbling alongside an insidious cabal that grifts under the banners of other people's work. The latter really bothers me; the black-plastic-tat-moulded-to-look-like-black-plastic-tat-you-once-asked-your-mum-to-buy... Butlins-level impersonators, wheeling out the same old faces. Frankly, I can do without all that guff. So yeah, I guess I wasn't expecting much from Neil's book.

If I'd watched more of his RMC episodes then I would have known better. Neil's knowledgeable, personable, and oozes a genuine love for hardware, games and magazines that's infectious. His book exemplifies this. For a start, it's not the Same. Old. Faces. (Although the Oliver Twins feature, and of course Mike Dailly is in there. Hello Mike!) For the most part these are people I can't actually remember reading about in ages; Al Lowe, George Sanger, Bill Volk, Francois Lionet, Stoo Cambridge, David Fox, Chris Sawer (the list goes on).

These are super interesting developers who don't pop up any-up anywhere near enough, and Neil's led them all on an interesting ramble. I ripped through 400 odd pages in a couple of sittings and wanted more. He's obviously had a load of these questions on his mind for a while, and it comes across like each interviewee was happy to be digging into the details. Honestly, after years of the same ol' Retrogamer questions, this comes across like a revelation.

If you have an interest in this stuff, give Neil a follow, check out the (Retro Tea Breaks podcast)[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/retro-tea-breaks/id1474670378]

It features all these interviews and more, and from what I've heard, each has been funny, interesting and informative. Fingers crossed that the rest get transcribed, and volumes 2 and 3 land.

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